Dungeons & Dragons is exploding in popularity and I think it is being driven by a mental health crisis.

I had a somewhat strange experience on Wednesday evening. A couple friends I made at the local game store invited me down to what they call a "session zero" designed for people to talk about the content of a tabletop roleplaying game like Dungeons & Dragons, and to discuss woke topics like 1) representation, 2) sexual content, 3) pronouns, and 4) things that trigger people. I'd never attended one of these, and I was surprised to find the table completely packed with over ten people (way too many for a game) all outlining their expectations for a tabletop RPG.

This was something I had never seen before, and at the risk of sounding like an old fart who yells at cloud, I thought it was kind of disturbing. I'm a liberal and a democrat. However, I'd be considered far right to some of these folks. It's very strange to see how sensitive people are in their interactions with others, and how much expectation they heap upon someone who just wants to get a game together with another person for the purpose of having fun. Folks, making friends has gotten very complicated.

The other shock of the day was that there was literally no room for me to play. So I'd have to look elsewhere to find a game. This puzzled me for a little while, and then I realized I'd been noticing this phenomenon more and more since the pandemic. Additionally, it suddenly hit me that the grocery stores I've been shopping at have not been as crowded lately. It's a combination of high prices (out of control inflation) and a crisis in mental health.

People (I believe) are scared, and they can't afford to go on vacation. They can't afford a lot of things, and so they are seeking out free entertainment like someone running a D&D game at a game store. Dungeons & Dragons has always been escapist. This latest phenomenon of tons of people overwhelming what few Dungeon Masters there are to go around looks a lot like, "I need something to escape the world in which I live." In other words, these tabletop RPG's have become a kind of therapy, similar to smoking mushrooms when you have PTSD. 

And in case you are wondering why this might be necessary, I have a friend who is on a waiting list for a therapist that is 8 months long. Given the amount of trauma being visited upon a large portion of the United States in the form of authoritarian edicts from the Supreme Court, coupled with climate crisis, gas prices that are the highest I've ever seen, and housing prices that are in the stratosphere, I think I can completely understand why people are seeking to escape...to flee...anywhere that they can. These are very strange times. I've never seen so many homeless people. They are everywhere in my city in places you would not expect. There are huge tent cities on sidewalks all throughout downtown, and there is litter and needles tossed on concrete and asphalt to just bake in the intense sun (everything is hotter and drier too). 

Anyway, it's just another hypothesis caused by another observation that I've made. I have no idea what it all means. The bigger picture is elusive, and I feel like I may paint things with too broad of a stroke. But I think that Dungeons & Dragons is exploding in popularity, and I believe it is being driven by a mental health crisis from which many people have no escape.

I'll be taking the 4th of July (Monday) off from blogging. Have a great weekend. I'll see you back here next week for the Insecure Writer's Support Group post.

Capitalism and the conservatives who support it have weaved us all into a Tholian Web.

If you are a Trekker, the episode called "The Tholian Web" was the ninth episode of the third season of the original Star Trek series. It was written by Judy Burns and Chet Richards and directed by Herb Wallerstein. It was first broadcast on November 15, 1968. In the episode, Captain Kirk is caught between dimensions while the crew of the Enterprise works to retrieve him. At this same time, the Tholians are weaving a destructive energy web around the Enterprise, and it goes very slowly. However, if it gets completed, then there is literally no escape. The ship and all its crew are toast (at least that is what my impression of the web was). 

Fast forward to modern 2022, and if you look hard enough, you can see the Tholian web that is encasing everyone and everything. It's called private equity. In an expose on Mother Jones (you can find it HERE), the reporter goes on to talk about private equity, and the destructive path it has weaved through the entire infrastructure of the United States. It's a thoroughly depressing read, because there's literally nothing we can do about it. The problem is too big. People don't have enough power to fight back against it, and the problem is so big that I'd argue that most people will never comprehend how private equity is strangling you and your family.

Here are some facts from the article:

1) Private Equity just in the last decade has taken control of more than 80 retailers, leading to the loss of 1.3 million jobs.

2) Private equity incursions into real estate has driven the cost of housing to astronomical levels. Frankly put, your children are doomed to be serfs in this country working paycheck to paycheck.

3) Private equity has bought up for-profit colleges, driving down graduation rates while increasing student debt.

4) Private equity has swallowed the healthcare sector, including hospitals, dermatologists, opthalmologists, veterinarians, hospice care, and nursing homes in order to squeeze every ounce of profit out of these places.

5) They also buy up politicians, but you know that already.

One example in the article that I read that was particularly telling was the story of a Brooklyn apartment. Its tenants paid around $3,500 a month, and the place was in good shape. A private equity firm financed by a Texas education teacher pension fund purchased the apartment, kicked out the residents, doubled the rent to $7,000 a month, and the people back in Texas were oblivious and happy that their "investment" was netting them profits to pay for retirements. They were told by the private equity firm that they had saved a Brooklyn apartment that was falling apart. The truth was that the apartments were nice brownstones with a big chandelier in the lobby, and they knew they could charge a ton more for it. That's what capitalism is: charging the highest price that the market will bear. It disregards ethics or morality...all goods should go to the highest bidder.

Another example was the story of a man who had built a company that made very good car parts. He took pride in his company, and wanted it to prosper because it had become the backbone of his community. Private Equity bought his company, chopped wages in half, sought to squeeze profit, cut corners, and the business faltered. Then they broke the company apart, making money off of the dissolution of the equipment and the sale of its assets. All the investors got a payday and all the employees got royally screwed over. 

Folks, I see this kind of thing all over the place in my job. I'm in and out of nursing homes caring for patients who have nothing...their entire life savings have gone to their end-of-life care. They live in one bedroom units usually split down the middle and they eat maybe $5.00 in food a day that is prepared cafeteria style by workers who make $12 per hour. Yet these places charge $8,000 a month. I know some of the executives in charge of these places and they have salaries equal to $40,000 a month. That's $480,000 a year, and they do nothing but plan their next vacation or their next car purchase. They brag about how much money their "policies" are making for the investors. This is wrong. I can't spell it out any other way.

Private Equity and rapacious capitalism are dooming everything. It's a Tholian Web that started long ago. The first lines weren't that threatening. The first incursions were easy to overlook. It slowly bought up this and that and then this other thing down the road from where you live. And bit by bit, Americans and the Middle Class failed to see it happening. Either that, or the situation was just too complicated to argue against. Anyone that spoke up gets shouted down by quick-minded greedy business people who do whatever it takes to convince you that private equity is not the boogeyman. And it was never "all bad" which is one way to keep committing evil. You let some good trickle down. It's an emotions game. If you can make a person feel good for a day, then you can get away with a lot.  I don't think there is a solution to it now...a solution to our "Tholian web" aside from a complete collapse of civilization into war. So this whole post is just me venting, because I feel so helpless to do anything other than hope that I won't become a slave to private equity, spooning gruel into my mouth and being thankful that the beatings were light today.

Here's the future that private equity has created for us: 1) climate crisis, 2) scarcity, 3) a gilded age of severe income inequality, 4) people dying earlier than their life expectancy, 5) everything is shoddily built, 6) modern day indentured servitude, 7) the rise of narcissism and selfishness, 8) mass incivility, 9) rampant greed with grifters everywhere, and 10) the fall of democracy. I probably could go on, but I'm not going to. It's bad enough already.

Inherited wealth provides such a staggering income advantage that it really is ridiculous.

Unless you've been living under a rock like the cavemen in the now infamous Geico commercials, you might have heard of Thomas Picketty. But in case you haven't (or are more concerned with things like Candy Crush) he's the author of a 700 page academic book published by Harvard University Press, and it's filled with dense mathematical formulae, graphs, and footnotes. You might ask, why on Earth is Mike interested in reading something that sounds so difficult to understand? Well, currently it's at the center of a firestorm in the United States regarding the debate of income inequality because it questions whether capitalism actually has the power to improve our quality of life. And when I say "our" I mean you and me who don't count ourselves as being rich, who drive old cars, and have a bad day when an unexpected bill for $700 arrives on "our" front doorstep.

If you take the time to read Picketty's book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and you unashamedly admire rich people because you think they worked hard for their wealth and that this same opportunity is there for you if you just try hard enough, you're probably not going to like the answer. Piketty basically calls capitalists on all their lies, debunking everything they've said for years regarding the ethical status of making money. The most profound lie may be this: that the commanding heights of the economy are controlled by talented individuals.

Picketty spent two decades studying inequality and currently teaches at the Paris School of Economics. I watched him on Squawk on the Street this week, and he's made the rounds on the Colbert Report and just about any media outlet you can shake a stick at. At the center of Picketty's work is not that a huge amount of wealth is concentrated in the top 1% of earners, but an analysis of what's causing this: the process of saving, investing, and building wealth. Picketty defines "capital" as any asset that generates a monetary return. He also believes that the inequality can't be separated from politics.

The examples of how much wealth has diverged within the lifetime of many baby boomers is staggering. In the 1950's the average American CEO was paid twenty times as much as the typical employee of their firm. Today, this ratio is 200 to 1. A popular model of economic growth by Robert Solow shows how the economy progresses along a balanced growth path with the shares of national income received by owners of capital and labor being pretty much constant over time. In reality, the share of income going to wages and other forms of labor compensation has dropped from 68% in 1970 to 62% in 2010. This is a decline of a trillion dollars. The richest 85 people in the world own more wealth than the roughly 3.5 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world's population.

Those of you out there who are fans of Jane Austen may support this kind of inequality in the United States because it means the emergence of a patrimonial society. If Picketty is believed (which I think he should be) then it's safe to say that your children will be living in a land where a few dynasties live lavishly on the fruits of their inherited wealth while the rest of the country struggles to put food on the table. Pickety points out that the share of the top income percentile is bigger than it was in South Africa in the 1960's, and in terms of income generated by work, the level of inequality is higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world.

In my opinion, inherited wealth provides such a staggering income advantage that it's ridiculous. Let me show you by example what I would do with just a million dollars (a laughable sum by today's standards of "being rich"). If I had a wealthy family and they offered to loan me one million dollars for just five years, and it was interest free, I'd totally take them up on that offer. Hell, I'd take anyone up on that offer. I would take the money and buy $1 million in AT&T stock or in BP (British Petroleum) and generate a staggering $50,000 a year in dividends alone. This would double my income for five years and put $250,000 in my pocket that I didn't have to lift a finger to earn. And in that time, the price of the stock would probably inch up and then I'd scoop some more money on the sale of the stock and return the million. That's how powerful inherited wealth is. Oh, and on that $250,000, I'd only have to pay a 25% capital gains tax. I wouldn't have to pay any social security at all and when I sold the stock in which I had the million invested, I'd only have to pay a 15% capital gains tax (and again...no social security). Pretty nice gig, right?

And what would I do with the $250,000 in dividends? I'd again, invest that in a stock with a dividend paying 5%. This would effectively increase my current wage by 60%, adding $13.00 an hour to what I make now. Considering that in the six years that I've worked my government job here in Utah I've only managed to increase my wage by $3.00, this is amazing. Here's a sad fact for you: now that it's June, I'm looking forward to my "yearly cost of living" raise, which (this year) is a generous .23 cents an hour. Yes, I get a .23 cent raise for 2014. Suddenly, all that was fuzzy has now become crystal clear.

Not surprisingly, I've joined the chorus of those who, like Picketty, are calling for a wealth tax with the idea of restraining the immense power of inherited wealth. In the least, people should wake up to the fact that those who defend unrestrained capitalism will push America to be a land that would be unrecognizeable to those in the baby boomer generation. If we don't get a reign on this out-of-control wealth generation, poverty may just end up as the new face of America by the end of the century as we're ruled by oligarchs who were just lucky enough to be born into the right family.